from Michael van Elst:
> mueller6...@twc.com ("Thomas Mueller") writes:
> >Do you know when (what version) NCQ was introduced to NetBSD? Was it before
> >or after 7.99.1?
> It's only in HEAD and will be in netbsd-9.
> >What is atatctl? "which atatctl" shows nothing. Is atatctl part of
> >smartmontools?
> Sorry, atactl, it is a native command. E.g.
> # atactl wd0 smart status
> SMART supported, SMART enabled
> id value thresh crit collect reliability description raw
(snip)
Now I see why I could trust my old 7.99.1 installation to act as server when I
was updating a NetBSD installation by NFS from the other computer.
Thanks for the information!
I looked through src/doc/CHANGES.prev on HEAD but couldn't find where NCQ was
introduced.
I ran "atactl wd1 smart status" but couldn't find anything wrong from that
display of information.
I suppose I should run smartmontools from a different hard drive or other drive
such as a USB stick?
from Mike Pumford:
> On 01/10/2019 14:36, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> > Do you know when (what version) NCQ was introduced to NetBSD? Was it
> > before or after 7.99.1?
> It went in after NetBSD 8.x was branched so I'd guess it would be somewhere in
> the 8.99.xx versions. It is in the 9.0_BETA branch as well.
> > What is atatctl? "which atatctl" shows nothing. Is atatctl part of
> > smartmontools?
> > I don't have smartmontools installed but could run it from the System
> > Rescue CD or build in NetBSD (or FreeBSD or Linux?) on the Hitachi hard
> > drive.
> > Firmware or driver bug could explain why the Western Digital Green hard
> > drive might be adversely affected but not all other hard drives.
> > I believe Western Digital discontinued the Green hard drives because of
> > technical or performance problems.
> The fact that the drives were deliberately designed to spin themselves down
> behind the back of the operating system and ATA driver meaning that the next
> time the OS tried to do an IO the operation would timeout and have to be
> retried after the disk had spun back up. This tended to trigger the type of
> fsbn errors you are seeing.
> All the extra spin up/spin down cycles played havoc with performance and I
> think also took its toll on the drive electronics. The whole idea was fairly
> flawed as spinning up a drive uses more power than at any other time in drive
> operation so doing it more often costs power unless you are confident that the
> drive can be down long enough to offset that usage.
> I thought they did finally produce a version of the firmware where you could
> at least turn that ridiculous behaviour off but I've no idea where you can
> find it. The other way to avoid it is to ensure the OS does a disk operation
> often enough to inhibit the spindown.
I haven't noticed the crash with FreeBSD, but FreeBSD has other problems, could
be either the hard drive or motherboard.
But if I want to go further with NetBSD, I guess I need to run
sysctl -w hw.wd1.use_ncq=0
and see if this solves the problem.
But I still need to be aware of the possibility of this hard drive going fully
bad.
Tom
